The Big Time to Stuart E. Athanasiou, Tom Dreyfus

The path looks unlikely at first: Leiber's *The Big Time* (1958), a locked-room drama where time-traveling soldiers make life-or-death calls on feel and nerve, connects to the Dreyfus brothers' *Mind Over Machine* (1986) through exactly three conceptual pivots — ethics of science, then artificial intelligence, then the book itself. But each hop tightens the argument. Leiber's Changewar operatives aren't computing optimal strategies; they're reading rooms, reading each other, making the kind of judgment calls that resist formalization — which is precisely the phenomenon the story never names but enacts. The middle hop, "artificial intelligence," is where the tension lives: AI researchers in the 1960s-80s kept promising that expert performance could be captured in rule-based systems, and the Dreyfus brothers kept pointing at exactly the kind of embodied, situational expertise Leiber's characters display and saying *no, that's not how it works*. The path from a 1958 SF novella to a 1986 philosophy-of-technology manifesto isn't a detour through abstraction — it's the same argument about whether human judgment is computable, told first as drama and then as polemic. Leiber wrote the phenomenology; Dreyfus named it.